Fellowship Program
PARC 2003 FELLOWSHIP ARTICLES
Mohammed Abu Daya Studies Water Pollution Along Gaza Coast
The shoreline along the Gaza Strip is facing large threats, asserts Mohammed
Abudaya, mainly “the severe pollution of the sea water and the beach,
which poses a major health risk for swimmers and marine life.” Abu Daya,
who is employed by the Environmental Quality Authority, is using his PARC grant
to set up a baseline study of the extent of pollution in the Gaza Strip shore
waters. He plans to offer elaborate methodologies to carry out monitoring and
mitigation scenarios to prevent untreated wastewater discharge into the sea
so as to avoid contamination. His study will include a database of information
on sea water quality and its pollutants.
“A relatively high population density, coupled with a poorly developed
infrastructure and low standard of living have all led to the current unsatisfactory
conditions,” says Abu Daya. At least 15 sewage outfalls discharge waste
into the coastal waters and intensive and uncontrolled use of fertilizers, pesticides
and other chemicals in coastal agriculture “is leading to contamination
of aquifer water as well as marine coastal waters,” he explains.
Abu Daya believes there is also evidence that biodiversity is at risk. “The
sand crab Ocypoda cursar and other well-known coastal species have disappeared.
Coastal bird fauna is on the decrease.”
The environmental problems cause significant risks to human health, as well,
“through consumption of contaminated seafood and bathing in contaminated
water.”
The current situation, he argues, “severely limits the economic and sustainable
development of the region.” He is convinced tourism will fail “miserably”
if the environment and quality of life of the region are not improved.
Previous attempts to monitor the seawater of the Gaza Strip have been modest.
The studies showed a high percentage of bathers “suffered adverse symptoms
after exposure to sea water.” Monitoring of heavy metals, hydrocarbons
and other substances was not included in the studies. Moreover, “the biological
characteristics and biological constituents including fauna, flora and protists
of Gaza Sea are not monitored and there is a complete lack of knowledge in this
area.”
Abu Daya is taking a series of water samples from six localities over a four-month
period. He will look for such indicators as high levels of nitrates and phosphates,
low oxygen concentrations, and the absence of many species of algae and solid
waste accumulation to verify that sewage pollution is the major threat to the
marine ecosystem.
Abu Daya holds a master’s degree from the International Institute of
Aerospace and Earth Science, The Netherlands, a B.Sc. from Birzeit University,
and a diploma from Al Azhar University in Gaza City. He lives in Gaza City.
Allan Researches Cultural Transmission in Lebanese Refugee
Camps
Modern technologies, particularly TV and the Internet, are playing a role in
shaping the sense of history, culture and identity of displaced Palestinians,
asserts Diana Allan, a Ph.D. candidate in social anthropology at Harvard University.
Allan has been studying this phenomenon and related issues as she co-directs
the creation of an archive of filmed, oral testimonies about al-Nakba (the 1948
catastrophe) with first generation refugees living in camps in Lebanon. These
issues are significant and timely, says Allan, as “the generation of 1948
with memories of life in Palestine is dying out, replaced by generations whose
collective sense of past and future is bound up with a country they have never
seen.” Of particular interest to her is the role technologies, such as
the Internet, play in the transmission of nationalist history and identity.
“Given that camp youth is becoming highly literate in Internet technology,
my research considers how increased communication among Palestinians in the
diaspora is enabling the creation of translocal discourses of historical authenticity.”
Allan’s research addresses how the current trend to capture those memories
through oral histories and commemorative practices, for example, is shaping
the young generation’s cultural identity. She asks what the impact of
television coverage, Web sites, martyr images and online activism might be and
how the various efforts to publicly memorialize events have affected the way
in which Palestinians convey what was once a largely oral and personal historical
tradition. Allan contends that her doctoral fieldwork and her archival project
“will allow me to investigate further to what extent nationalist history
and identity are being transmitted through performative set pieces - folklore,
poems, life stories - or if they are instead part of a broader social intelligence
embedded in the idiomatic fabric of everyday life.”
Allan has been living and conducting fieldwork in Shatila camp and other refugee
communities in Lebanon since the fall of 2002. Her methodology includes ethnographic
research of camp life, participant observation and open-ended interviews. As
part of her study she has been interviewing representatives of institutions,
principally non-governmental organizations and factions that operate in the
camps, to gain a perspective on the ways in which they inflect the interpretation
of Palestinian nationalist history. Allan is also reviewing previously recorded
and televised histories, art, graffiti, and Web sites as well as public commemorative
practices.
Allan’s work suggests that contemporary cultural practices are reshaping
the ways in which history is being interpreted by refugees living in the camps.
“A codified, traumatic history is being ceaselessly re-filtered through
the radically unstable lens of the current situation; in other words, the context
of narration giving meaning to these histories includes the need not only to
make sense of and transmit a traumatic past, but also the attempt to take hold
of and give shape to an imminently uncertain present and future.”
Gail Boling Studies Palestinian Property Restitution Claims
A study of the property restitution claims of Palestinian refugees is the focus
of research by Gail Boling, J.D. Boling, senior legal researcher at Birzeit
University’s Institute of Law and assistant editor of the Palestine Yearbook
of International Law, will look at the legal entitlements of the refugees –
how their various legal claims (including property restitution) should be processed
and adjudicated under international law.
“My goal is to start sketching out a return/compensation/restitution
claims mechanism for Palestinian refugees that complies with their legal rights
under the formula of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and international law
generally,” explains Boling.
Boling will look at three precedents: Bosnia/Croatia, South Africa, and the
restitution laws passed by the Allied Powers in the various occupied zones of
Germany following the end of World War II.
She intends to conduct extensive library research and on-site visits to Germany,
Bosnia/Croatia and South Africa (to the extent that her budget permits). The
property restitution schemes of the second and third areas are comparatively
younger “and thus less written literature exists,” she said. Through
interviews with practitioners currently in the field, she will learn how the
claims procedures “have been adapted and modified over the course of time
to adjust to the realities of the local environment.”
Boling’s topic is one of “pressing importance that must be tackled
systematically in the process of working for a lasting resolution of this conflict.”
Scholarly contributions regarding property restitution—and other rights
to which refugees may make claims under international law—should be useful
to all stakeholders involved in seeking a resolution to the present conflict.
The refugees themselves “should be able to make informed decisions about
their preferred choice of a durable solution to their own status, in the context
of any future final settlement negotiations.” Likewise, Israelis and Quartet
representatives need to know what the legal entitlements of the refugees are
under international law. “Such information is crucial for judging whether
any proposed final settlement agreement conforms with the minimum requirements
of international law,” asserts Boling. A final settlement in which the
most important (and most numerous) stakeholders are “on board” should
have the best chance of leading to a lasting solution to the conflict, Boling
suggests.
Boling earned a B.A. from the University of Chicago and a J.D. from The Ohio
State University College of Law. She has been a guest lecturer at Oxford University’s
International Summer School in Forced Migration and coordinator of the legal
unit of BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights.
She has published several law review articles, a monograph, and a series of
UN treaty-body submissions concerning the legal rights of Palestinian refugees
under international law. Recently she participated in two international conferences
on Palestinian refugees in Ottawa, Canada, and Heidelberg, Germany.
Ilana Feldman Explores Civil Service Influences Under British
and Egyptian Governance
Ilana Feldman used her PARC grant to complete research needed to revise her
dissertation for publication as a book. Her dissertation, which won the 2002
Malcolm Kerr Award for best dissertation in the social sciences from the Middle
East Studies Association (MESA), looks at civil service in Gaza during the British
Mandate (1917-1948) and the Egyptian administration (1948-1967).
Feldman is Mellon Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, and lecturer
in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. She said her prior
two years of research in Gaza, Jerusalem, and Cairo “investigated processes
through which people and places are constituted, controlled, and governed.”
Feldman notes that Gaza has been ruled by many different regimes other than
the two she is studying. The most striking continuities, she found, are in the
legal regimes—“which have been only amended and never overturned”—and
the most striking differences “are related to the provisions of services
to the population.”
Her dissertation is divided into three sections. Part one identifies mechanisms
through which authority is established and rule propagated. Part two explores
the production of order and security and examines the regulation of persons,
communities, and ideas. The final part focuses on the provision of services—crisis
services (food, shelter), everyday services (transportation, utilities, communications),
and community services (religious services, education). “I consider how
service delivery participates in the formation of a practice of ‘tactical
government’ that is marked by anxiety, incapacity, and control,”
she explains.
Feldman noted that despite “evident richness,” the civil services
and bureaucracy have been infrequent subjects of anthropological inquiry.”
The anthropology of bureaucracy “can do more than simply add to the corpus
of anthropological knowledge,” she said. “It can encourage a critical
rethinking of key analytical categories and methodologies.” In addition,
Feldman asserts, “my project argues that cultural history is vital to
understanding the dynamics of Palestinian experience.”
With her PARC grant, Feldman returned to Jerusalem in the summer of 2003 to
reconsider material previously examined, gather additional materials--particularly
the records of the Mandate Department of Education and police departments--and
spend time with the retired civil servants with whom she conducted her ethnographic
research.
“I am also interested in whether the dramatically different conditions
in Gaza now have impacted their perspectives on any of the issues we discussed.”
Feldman holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and an M.A. from New
York University.
Ghodieh Analyzes Land Use/Land Cover in the Northern West
Bank
“All land use/land cover types in the West Bank are being exposed to
severe changes, which in turn affect the whole life of the Palestinians,”
says Dr. Ahmed Ghodieh, chair of the Geography department at An-Najah University.
Ghodieh seeks to analyze the changes using remote sensing and Geographical Information
System (GIS) technologies applied to two specific historical dates – 1970
and 1994. In so doing, he intends to map the region and compare the geographical
changes over time in light of the political situation, which, he argues, has
adversely affected the land resources in the region.
One example is the change in agricultural exports to neighboring countries
that has resulted from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. As Ghodieh points out,
Jordan restricted imports from the West Bank after 1987, which, he asserts,
led to the disappearance of certain crop types, such as watermelon, from the
region. In addition, the construction of roads and settlements and weak land
use laws are resulting in land degradation, deforestation, contamination, salinization
and erosion. Land use, he claims, has not been monitored by Palestinians, who
are mistrustful of data provided by Israeli sources due to the on-going conflict.
Through his research, Ghodieh is documenting the changes occurring in the northern
part of the West Bank. He hopes to provide data that will be useful in planning
sustainable land use development there in the future.
Remote sensing and GIS techniques have been used extensively in the United
States and Europe to monitor, evaluate and estimate land use/land cover types
and to predict geographical changes. The benefits of using these technologies
in his research include the regularity of the time intervals when data can be
captured, the accuracy of the data, and the ability to take images of large
geographical areas. One such image may cover an area of 60 km2—the equivalent
of approximately 35 1/50000 scale aerial photographs. Ghodieh’s analysis
also includes the use of aerial photographs, maps and field data collected in
six study areas.
Accessing the region to conduct comprehensive field studies is complicated
by the current political situation and environmental factors such as the mountainous
terrain and weather conditions. He collects data on the ground to explain and
classify photographic images. However, due to the current security situation
and travel restrictions in the West Bank, field research has been conducted
largely by university students who live in the study areas.
Ghodieh’s study will be the first academic Palestinian study of land
use/land cover in the West Bank using these sophisticated techniques. He believes
that the resultant data will give future land use planners greater confidence
in their decision-making and assist them in planning appropriate land use strategies.
Samer Hamidi Studies the Effect of Implementing an Essential
Drug List in the West Bank
Recognizing that drug costs are a key component in the costs of healthcare,
particularly in developing countries, the Palestinian Ministry of Health (PMOH)
introduced an Essential Drug List (EDL) in Palestine in 2000. The EDL seeks
to mitigate the high social and economic costs of irrational drug use in public
health facilities and to improve the cost effectiveness of health care in Palestinian
areas through economic and efficient use of pharmaceuticals. Samer Hamidi, a
doctoral student in public health at Tulane University, is researching the social,
economic, and medical effects of implementing the EDL in the West Bank so that
he can provide statistical evidence of the effects of such public health policy
in Palestine. Hamidi uses regression analysis and multivariate techniques to
analyze data collected from PMOH’s annual reports and historical records
of public hospitals and primary health care directorates going back to 1997.
Hamidi points out that the increase in pharmaceutical costs in relation to
overall healthcare costs is a serious concern in Palestine. This increase is
tied to many factors, including inflation, irrational drug use, over prescription,
increased drug utilization and increased drug prices. The Palestinian Ministry
of Health, with the help of the World Health Organization and the World Bank
developed their EDL according to the state’s particular needs. Cost, demographic
and epidemiological characteristics of the population, therapeutic characteristics
of the drugs, and financial resources were factored into the list’s development.
“Per capita governmental health expenditures on drugs and inpatient mortality
rates were reduced after 2000, yet this reduction was not attributed to the
essential drug list or investigated by any research,” Hamidi adds. “Many
studies focus on the cost savings introduced by the essential drug list,”
he adds, but few go on to analyze the health benefits. In his view, “the
trade off between cost savings and health effects . . . will be extremely important
to judge the true effect of that drug policy.”
Hamidi believes that his study will be instrumental in evaluating the efficacy
of the EDL and its effect on public health in Palestine and beyond. “Because
the essential drug list is a WHO drug policy that was implemented in many countries,
this research will be of great importance for other countries as well.”
Dr. Maher Zuhdi Hashweh Investigates Adolescent Conceptions
of Democracy
"We need to understand students' ideas and thinking about democracy to
better design curriculum and instruction in democracy education in Palestine,"
asserts Dr. Maher Zuhdi Hashweh, chair of the Democracy and Human Rights Graduate
Program and associate professor of education at Birzeit University. Hashweh
believes that studying adolescent conceptions of democracy will provide practical
information on what components of democracy they understand, their level of
understanding, and where their understanding is superficial. Through his study,
he also hopes to gain insight into the students' complex cognitive structures
as related to democracy, and how these structures reflect their culture.
Hashweh’s earlier research indicated that students display basic understandings
of components of democracy, such as equality, fairness, justice, rule of law
and freedom. He points out, however, that they have only a superficial understanding
of some elements, such as the separation of powers, and may even hold misconceptions
about other components, for example the degree of freedom democracy affords.
"We need to know more about the developmental trajectories of the students,"
he adds, "and take this knowledge into consideration in designing democracy
education programs that are appropriate to Palestinian society."
Hashweh plans to survey and interview students age 14 to 18, and utilize parallel
methods among experts (university faculty) and graduate students in the Democracy
and Human Rights Program. Inclusion of these groups "will allow us to describe
what expertise in the domain of democracy means and how experts solve social/political
problems compared to novices," explains Hashweh. He believes that comparing
differences on how these groups organize their knowledge and use knowledge and
strategies in approaching democracy-related problems and issues will illuminate
the outcomes of democracy education and lead to improved educational programs
in the field.
Hashweh holds an M.A. in Education from The American University of Beirut,
and received a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University. He is widely published
in the areas of science education, research on teaching, and democracy education.
Amal Hudhud Studies Management of Olive Mill Wastewater
in Palestine
Olive mill pressing – the process by which olive oil is made –
poses one of the greatest environmental threats in Palestine as the waste water
is discharged directly into the groundwater. “More than ninety percent
of the olives grown in Palestine are processed in the West Bank,” declares
Amal Hudhud, whose doctoral research aims to identify practical techniques to
reduce the environmental damage caused by this process.
According to Hudhud, there are approximately 256 olive pressing mills in the
West Bank that discharge more than 1000 cubic meters of wastewater each day.
The organic materials in the wastewater affect the quality of the water and
sewage treatment operations. The waste water is made up of compounds, some of
which are highly toxic but biodegradable, while others are less toxic, but not
easily biodegradable.
The seasonal nature of the industry and the geographic concentration of olive
mills make dealing with the environmental impact of this wastewater crucial.
Until the early 1970s, treatment of olive mill wastewater has primarily been
through storage and natural evaporation in large ponds. Olive mill wastewater
is directly toxic to land and aquatic animals and plants.
“In Palestine there are no waste management programs for hazardous or
non-hazardous waste generated by industry. Therefore, all industrial waste is
directly released to the environment untreated,” she points out. The toxic
organic matter in the wastewater negatively affects wastewater collection and
treatment in the public sewage networks as well as the quality of the water
bodies. The remaining polyphenolic compounds are less toxic, but turn a black
color on oxidation.
Hudhud’s aim is “to identify practical techniques to reduce the
environmental damage caused by wastewater from the olive industry through managing
the olive mill wastewater pollution and the efficiency of its treatment to ensure
the reduction of the pollutant loads below specific limits while attempting
to minimize investment and cost.” While detailed studies have been conducted
in Tunisia, none have yet been carried out in Palestine. Hudhud hopes to find
a technique that keeps the olive mill wastewater stabilized to avoid oxidation.
In order to do so, she hopes to determine the factors that affect the wastewater
and to develop ways to control them.
Hudhud is a Ph.D. candidate in environmental engineering at Loughborough University
in England and has worked as a project coordinator for the Nablus Municipality’s
Water and Sanitation department since 1997. PARC received a special grant from
the Palestine Investment Fund to help underwrite Hudhud’s research.
Palestinian Citizens of Israel and Israel’s Legal
System Subject of Yousef Jabareen's Research
Since October 2000, bloody clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian
citizens of Israel have brought renewed attention to the issue of the status
of Palestinian citizens of Israel. According to Yousef Jabareen, who received
his Ph.D. from the Georgetown University Law School in 2003, Palestinian citizens
of Israel have historically been considered a “potential fifth column”
and enemies of the state systematically excluded from public life. Their status
is complicated by the inherent conflict between Israel’s self-definition
as a Jewish state and its declared commitment to democratic principles.
“The definition of Israel as a Jewish state is expressed in many aspects
of law and policy in a way that excludes and discriminates against the Palestinian
citizens in Israel,” Jabareen expounds, citing as an example the Law of
Return, which grants citizenship to any Jew who wants to settle in Israel. “This
law leads to perpetual discrimination against the Palestinian citizens in the
fields of citizenship and residency.” Jabareen points out the inherently
discriminatory nature of ethnic-specific laws and policies that extend to areas
of housing, water, land, allocation of public resources, public symbols, and
political disenfranchisement.
However, some recent Supreme Court rulings involving the rights of Palestinian
citizens of Israel have been more progressive, says Jabareen. “Most of
these cases have been viewed by Israeli liberals as landmark rulings that substantially
advance equality for Arab citizens of Israel.” Through his research, Jabareen
thoroughly analyzes these cases to prove that, while they advance individual
rights, they do not advance the rights of Palestinians as a national minority
group. Indeed, he posits that they serve to perpetuate historical state-sponsored
discrimination. He argues that “in order for Palestinian citizens of Israel
to truly enjoy an equal structure of opportunities on equal footing with their
fellow Jewish citizens, they must be guaranteed, as a group, a true realization
of the group aspects of their rights, primarily: attaining effective political
and civic participation, getting a distribution of public resources proportional
to their needs, and benefiting from effective affirmative action programs to
compensate them for past discrimination; and not less important, freely maintaining
their cultural and national identity.”
Jabareen also critically analyzes Israel’s judicial record relative to
its protection of its Palestinian minority in comparison to the treatment of
minority populations under Western judicial systems.
Jabareen, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, is a human rights attorney and community
activist. He served as head of the National Arab Student Union in Israel (1995-6)
and Director of the Equality for Arab Citizens Project at the Association for
Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) from 1997 to 2000. In the spring of 2004 he will
teach courses on the legal status of Palestinians in Israel at the Universities
of Haifa and Tel Aviv.
Islah Jad Examines the Palestinian Women’s Movement
in the Emerging Palestinian State
“My intent, declares Islah Jad regarding her current research,
is to present the Palestinian women’s movements from the aftermath
of the Oslo agreements until the Israeli invasion and reoccupation
of Palestinian towns in March 2002.” Jad sees the current
situation as a de-mobilization of mass movements and rise of “NGOization
in the post-Oslo environment. This process entails the mushrooming
of NGOs,” with different structures, vision, discourse, and
programs that suit their unique vision. NGOization,” she asserts,
is also about the emergence of a new and different women's elite
empowered by a universal agenda for democratization in general and
women's empowerment in particular.”
As Jad points out, this process is occurring against a background
of international changes in women's movements. Women’s movements
worldwide, she posits, are “geared toward a discourse of equality
for women, sharing development outcomes and sharing power positions.”The
Palestinian women's movement faces the additional challenges of
continuing the national struggle while participating in state building.
Under normal conditions, it is difficult to straddle these two agendas,
let alone when in an extraordinary situation in which the state
and society are threatened in their very physical existence,”
says Jad. She believes examining how women's gender interests are
represented in the state structures will illuminate how they were
reconstructed following the Oslo accords. Her study will focus on
“femocrats” women in positions of power in the bureaucracy
and the differing agendas among women in different political organizations,
from the ruling party to left wing political parties, NGOs and the
Islamist movement.
Jad intends to conduct in-depth interviews with women’s activists in
old and new organizations, women working in the Palestinian Authority, and some
male activists in grassroots organizations. “In the course of my research,
a deconstruction of patrimonialism or neo-patrimonialism as the main paradigm
to understand the Palestinian Authority will be necessary to give way to other
dynamics affecting the nascent state.”
Jad is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of London’s School of Oriental
and African Studies, and lecturer in the Women’s Studies Institute and
Cultural Studies Department at Birzeit University.
Kanaaneh Focuses on Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli
Military
Dr. Rhoda Kanaaneh, assistant professor of anthropology at American University,
is researching the politics of national identity through examining the Palestinians
who serve voluntarily in the Israeli military and security forces. Kanaaneh
is looking at how this small group of mostly men and a few women construct their
own identities, and how they are perceived by the Palestinian community and
by the Israeli state and military. Her hypothesis is that “the experiences
of these soldiers, how they negotiate their relationships to their communities
and to the state, and the ways in which they are accepted, integrated, and marginalized,
form a powerful vantage point from which to understand citizenship, ethnic conflict
as well as gender and class in Israel and beyond.”
Some of the questions raised in her research address the motivations of these
individuals and the transformations they undergo as a result of their experiences
– in their personal interactions with their peers, their families, their
communities, and more broadly, in their relationship to the state. She believes
that understanding these complicated relationships will result in a deeper understanding
of Palestinian identity in light of the rights and duties of Israeli citizenship,
which is inherently fraught with tension.
Kanaaneh points out that “Palestinians inside Israel increasingly publicly
articulate their struggle in terms of equal rights in a state of all its citizens.
This is met with an increasing Zionist focus on the absence of equal obligations
for Arab citizens –i.e., the exemption of most Arabs from mandatory military
service. While this contingency between citizenship duties and rights is certainly
questionable, it nonetheless places Palestinian military service – and
thus the group of people in this study – at the heart of a central debate.”
Kanaaneh believes her research will not only provide insight into issues central
to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but will also contribute to the broader,
global issues of minority-state relations and ethnic conflict. She suggests
that “marginal but highly ‘accommodating’ minority individuals,
such as the soldiers in my study, tend to test the outer limits of their communities
and the states in which they live,” thus addressing broader issues of
citizenship, equality and nationalism.
Kanaaneh’s research includes interviews with Palestinian volunteers in
the army, the border patrol and the police, who serve for periods ranging from
eight months to 30 years. She also conducted interviews with their relatives
and neighbors, and other members of their communities. Kanaaneh used her PARC
fellowship to perform additional fieldwork over the summer of 2003 and pursue
additional questions raised during her preliminary research, such as the impact
on this group of the second Intifada and the reinvasion of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
Kanaaneh received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University in 1998.
In addition to her PARC fellowship, Kanaaneh’s research received funding
through the Faculty Research Support program at American University.
Morag Kersel Investigates Illicit Trade and Looting of
Palestinian Antiquities
Morag Kersel’s extensive background in archaeology and historic preservation
converge as she examines the ways that nations protect their cultural property
from destruction caused by the trafficking in antiquities and the illegal excavation
of archaeological sites.
Her overall research is a comparative study of Israel, Palestine and Mali, while
her PARC grant enables her to focus on Palestinian subsistence looters—individuals
who have turned to looting of archaeological sites for economic support. She
also will look at the Palestinian Department of Antiquities’ efforts to
stop the looting.
“There has been a dramatic rise in the incidence of this activity, particularly
since the beginning of the current Palestinian uprising,” asserts Kersel.
She attributes this to massive Palestinian unemployment and the rapid erosion
of the local economy.
While Israel has a system of legally controlled venues for selling antiquities,
she seeks to find out what methods Palestine will employ to protect its heritage.
In 1993 Palestine’s Department of Antiquities banned the legal trade in
antiquities, “but given the current situation and the porous borders for
artifacts, looting and destruction of archaeological sites continue unhindered,”
admits Kersel.
She will track looted artifacts from Palestine to their appearance in shops
in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Israel through an analysis of the trade
obtained from auction catalogs and the Internet. While visiting the region,
she will interview dealers, collectors, archaeologists and legal professionals
to evaluate the legally managed market.
She will then work with the Palestinian Department of Antiquities and the Palestinian
Association for Cultural Exchange “to facilitate my access to the front
lines of protection against illicit trade and looting.” Further interviews,
including with the diggers themselves, will complement her statistical information.
“What remains to be established is whether or not a legally sanctioned
trade in antiquities acts as a deterrent to looting,” she explains. She
will also try to answer such questions as “Do policing entities act as
deterrents to looting?” and “What policy will the Palestinian state
choose to curb the destruction of their national and cultural heritage when
the occupying forces are gone?”
Kersel holds two master’s degrees: in Near Eastern archaeology from the
University of Toronto and in historic preservation from the University of Georgia.
She is now based at the University of Cambridge, where she is a Ph.D. candidate.
Basem Raad Explores Links between Palestine's Past and
Present
Basem Lutfi Ra’ad, professor of English and world civilizations at Al-Quds
University, asserts that “Palestinian ancient roots have been buried over
centuries by a combination of elision and neglect. On the one hand, people have
continued to live here and to mix here over the millennia; on the other hand,
other voices – not those of the subjects – have perpetuated what
is written as if it were history, thus sidelining larger facts and contexts,
magnifying and distorting perspectives.”
To support his arguments, Ra’ad points to nineteenth and twentieth century
travel accounts and scholarly writings, and to more recent anthropological studies,
which, he claims “have been largely controlled by the double-edged agendas
of Zionist and later Israeli scholars.” Accepting these dominant viewpoints,
he adds, “ha[s] serious implications that affect common perceptions of
diverse areas from history and politics to religious development, to languages
and questions of identity and continuity. Countering such dominance with available
new information would have wide-ranging impact on both Palestinian self-understanding
and understandings by others.”
Another interesting feature Ra’ad sees is that Palestinians themselves
tend to shorten their history in their current short-term affiliations. He believes
that “establishing concrete links, outside the dominant paradigm, would
go a long way toward altering the view of human development in Palestine.”
Through his study, Ra’ad hopes to explore the gaps and inconsistencies
that plague accounts of ancient Palestinian practices in order to recover “hidden
history and counter hegemonic narratives.”
Underlying his research is the idea that “present Palestinian customs
and tradition have remnants of ancient cultural habits and that these have been
covered up or modified by subsequent religious and cultural developments.”
Ra’ad sees evidence of the continuities between past and present as well
as the increased speed in which Palestinian customs are currently being lost.
As evidence is retrieved systematically, he posits, the case for continuities
between Palestine’s past and present can work “to raise Palestinian
consciousness and . . . project an alternative historical process.”
“Voices from the Schoolyard Subject of Thomas M.
Ricks Research
The study of schools in Palestine is the focus of research by Thomas M. Ricks,
visiting associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. Ricks’
project completes the more than 300 hours of oral histories he has conducted
over several years and completes his investigation of archival holdings in the
United Kingdom on Palestinian schools, educators and students and British Mandate
mission schools. The findings are an integral part of his monograph project,
Voices from the Schoolyards: Memories of Palestine, Schools and Mission Education,
AD 1853-1973, which he plans to submit for publication in 2004.
“The proposed research focuses on Palestinian education and foreign mission
and British mandatory schools for the 19th and 20th centuries in the towns of
Ramallah, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem,” Ricks reports. He plans to document,
describe and analyze the political, social and cultural evolution and effects
of Palestinian education on the country’s rural and urban community and
national leaders.
His thesis is twofold: that the World War I and Mandate periods are “the
watershed in the evolution of Palestinian national identity and political culture
as seen from the perspective of Palestine’s schools, teachers, students,
and subjects studied” and that the boom in schools from the 1920s to the
1940s “unintentionally laid the foundation for the eventual collapse of
Palestinian educated middle and upper-class leadership in the face of British
and Zionist violence on the one hand, and escalating Palestinian rural resistance
on the other.”
“It was as though Palestine’s middle and upper classes were ‘blinded’
by their own comforts and successes to the rapidly changing political events
beyond the Eastern Mediterranean,” explains Ricks. His thesis argues that
the schools, teachers, and European-American educational political culture so
praised and eagerly sought after by Palestinians in the three cities created
the “blinders” to the pending military and political catastrophe
or nakba of 1948-49.
Palestine’s past and present schools, teachers, and textbooks, as well
as the memories of those teachers and students, are “a fragile national
treasure in danger of being lost in the rubble of Palestine’s past and
present travails and struggles,” Ricks said.
During the summer of 2003, he reviewed letters, diaries, memoranda, and reports
from the periods and re-interview 25 people on new topics, with support from
Birzeit University as well as PARC.
Ricks holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from Indiana University. He previously received
a Senior Fulbright Research Grant.
Al-Salim Investigates Tulkarm's Social History in the Late
Ottoman Period
“Modernity in Palestine did not come about as a result of specific events,
but rather as the cumulative effect of political, economic, and social developments
that took place during the nineteenth century and persisted throughout the final
years of the Ottoman period,” asserts Farid Al-Salim, a Ph.D. candidate
in history at the University of Arkansas. For his dissertation, Al-Salim is
analyzing the impact the late Ottoman administrative system had on new administrative
centers in Palestine, using Tulkarm as a case study.
The primary goal of his research, he explains, “is to complete a missing
history of modern Palestine, the provincial history.” Al-Salim believes
his research will fill the gaps left by earlier researchers as it discusses
the implications of the Ottoman reforms within the context of an interior Palestinian
town. Tulkarm, he explains, was a small village that became the seat of a new
Ottoman qada’ (sub-district) in the late 19th century. As such, says Al-Salim,
it “underwent social, economic, demographical and environmental changes
that vividly illustrate the cumulative effect of modernity throughout Palestine.”
His research addresses all of these isssues.
According to Al-Salim, “Tulkarm represents a town in which all of the
Ottoman concerns for modernization converged. Not only was it one of the new
administrative centers within the Ottoman Arab provinces, “its location
within Palestine presented the Ottomans with the gravest need to modernize the
administration to meet the pressing challenges of European penetration and,
by the 1880s, of Zionist immigration.”
Over a six-month period in 2003, Al-Salim traveled to Jordan to review Ottoman
official documents in the Center of Documents and Manuscripts at the University
of Jordan (Amman), the records of the Islamic Court of Law and the Civil Law
court, and the Ottoman Salinamas, the annual reports of the Ottoman provinces
for the years 1888 to 1918. “The Sijil records give a realistic view of
Tulkarm township society, regarding social, judicial, property, inheritance,
and marriage, population, and debt problems,” says Al-Salim, who adds
that they also provide good descriptions of trade between Tulkarm and other
villages, as well as with key commercial centers, such as Haifa, Jaffa and Beirut.
His stay in Amman was partly funded by the American Center of Oriental Research
as well as by PARC.
Al-Salim’s research also included two months of field research in London
to examine documents in the British Public Records office and took two trips
to Tulkarm. There he found many records from the Ottoman post office and local
court, which proved to be very useful.
Sherene Seikaly Studies Palestinian Cultures of Consumption
in Israel
Sherene Seikaly’s research on Palestinian “cultures of consumption”
will endeavor to show how Palestinians in Israel have “negotiated their
citizenship through practices of consumption and engagement in the market.”
A doctoral candidate in history and Middle Eastern studies at New York University,
Seikaly intends to study Palestinians as consumers through direct and extensive
contact with both Palestinians and Israelis in the marketplace. The continued
study will offer a historical perspective on Palestinian consumption through
the forty-year period that begins in 1948.
To prepare for her further study, Seikaly researched Palestinian consumption
through a study of beauty pageants sponsored largely by local newspapers and
an Israeli dairy manufacturer, providing an interesting juxtaposition of Israeli
products and markets and the Palestinian consumer. She will now expand upon
the promising evidence of her initial study through fieldwork, analysis of advertising
and promotional campaigns, and interviews.
Much of Seikaly’s attention will be given to a review of advertising
campaigns in Palestinian and Israeli newspapers and also on billboards and on
radio and television. Seikaly insists that “advertisements are in no sense
transparent vehicles with easily detected meanings. At the same time, advertising
does not just conceal or recuperate material exchange; it also creates structures
of meaning.” One crucial aspect of consumption, Seikaly believes, is “the
discursive realm of advertising.” Through analysis it is possible to “access
the production of meaning, desire, and identification” in advertising.
But the complexities of “discursive formations around commodities”
and “the intricate emotional and intellectual investments made by individuals
within commodity culture” cannot be fully understood separate from people’s
experiences. For that reason, Seikaly will give six months of her study to interviews
with Palestinian businessmen, journalists, workers, and consumers in the city
of Haifa and the northern village of al-Jish.
Recognizing that the 20th century record of consumption has proven revealing
for an understanding of citizenship in such contexts as the United States, postwar
France, and postwar West Germany, Seikaly believes her study will fulfill a
need for similar evidence of how Palestinian identity has been negotiated.
Linda Tabar Investigates the Transformation of Palestinian
Historical Narratives After the Oslo Accords
A Ph.D. candidate in Political Studies at the University of London’s
School of Oriental and African Studies, Linda Tabar is researching the transformation
of historical narratives after the Oslo accords of 1993-1995 in order to explore
the following three questions:
1.In what ways do minority narratives, subaltern memories, and individual voices
contribute to defining a nation in periods of national struggle?
2.What critical light do these narratives shed on the effects of conflict on
society?
3.Do such narratives offer alternative perspectives for the development of strategies
for settling protracted colonial conflicts?
Current studies on nationalism, she argues, “ignore the specificity of
anti-colonial nationalism, view the nation as an unchanging category, and neglect
the agency of subordinate social groups.” By adopting the perspective
of subaltern studies, Tabar seeks to bridge social and political studies using
national identity, collective memory and conflict resolution to elicit new theoretically
informed conclusions on the effect of conflict on societies. In so doing, she
believes her study “will contribute new perspectives to the ongoing debate
on the construction of national identity as set within and effected by political
and ideological structures that sustain conflict.”
Tabar’s research plans combine state-centered and social-agency theoretical
approaches to examine the divergence between the Palestinian official narrative
and the refugees’ historical narratives. She believes her study will bring
attention to how problems with the Oslo framework affect Palestinian society
as a whole. “The study,” she says, “will illuminate the role
of the refugees in problematizing Oslo’s marginalization of Palestinian
historical experience, uncovering new voices that invoke and support the necessity
of recognition.” Her research extends beyond the theoretical, with an
eye toward “uncover[ing] new forms of social action, identifying actors
and processes that provide an alternative to violence and political protest
and promote counter-hegemonic interventions.”
Ultimately, she adds, her research may illustrate “the ruptures and contradictions
produced by the interaction between Palestinian official and refugee narratives
in order to explore whether these forces produce structural changes that affect
the way the direction of national struggle and the ways in which complex conflict
is settled.” Tabar’s research includes oral histories and interviews
with refugees in the Jenin and Dheisheh refugee camps as well as Palestinian
and Israeli officials, NGO workers and other members of the community.
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